I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

“I like you Siri, you’re going places.” So ends Martin Scorcese’s paid homage to the iPhone’s virtual assistant. But with the introduction of Google‘s Voice Search for iOS, Siri’s shortcomings are becoming more apparent. The problem is contextual data. Google has (lots of) it and Apple has to buy it piecemeal from Yelp, WolframAlpha, Yahoo and, yes, Google.

In a test done by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in June (and reported by MacRumors), Google accounted for 60% of Siri’s data diet:

And Apple, in its Android Rage, seems to be looking to sever ties with Google as much as possible. Kind of looks like Siri is going nowhere, Martin.

The Google Search app for iOS now has a voice icon just like its Android built-in equivalent, and it works remarkably well. This is not (yet) a personal assistant. Voice Search only searches the web at present, but with the strong likelihood that a user’s Gmail and Apps data will become searchable (by the user) as well, Google is within striking distance of Siri’s functionality.

Plus, Google has improved its user interface for certain kinds of informational results, like flight tracking and currency conversions, on mobile devices, and now displays them in a nice, big, display box at the top of the screen. These are borrowed from the “cards” in the Google Now built-in app available on the Nexus 7 tablet. And soon, if you search for a popular topic (“famous jazz composers,” for instance) the search results will be broken out in a visual carousel at the top of the page. All of this is supported by Google’s Knowledge Graph (move over Facebook), that “currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects.” And this is not a static resource, but one that is “tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.”

When all of this contextual information includes a user’s own data it approaches personal assistant status. Google Now doesn’t reschedule your appointments for you like Siri, but it does show you relevant information when you need it, based on your mail, calendars and other Google apps you are using. This is a great example of Google doing what only it can do, and what the video below shows for the Nexus 7, will soon be available for mobile devices and the desktop.

It is notable that Google has not adopted any Siri-like personas for either its Voice Search or its new Google Now services. Considering the troubles Google has with Apple over Android, it is not surprising that they are taking a different tack. Google being Google, though, they have a sure-fire Siri-killer at their disposal. If it opens the API’s for all of this to developers so that they can create custom personas on top of Voice Search, Google Now and Knowledge Graph, Siri will certainly be crowded out by a cacophony of more well-informed voices tuned to specific personality types.

But Apple is not sitting on its hands for all of this. As Daniel Eran Dilger writes on the Apple Insider blog, Google faces some roadblocks and Apple can add to them. First off, Google Now requires the latest version of Android (Jellybean 4.1) and at the moment, less than 1% of Android users have upgraded. “A full 80 percent of the active user base are suck with a version of Android 2.x, which came out 2010,” notes Dilger. “In contrast, Apple just noted that 80 percent of iOS users are running the latest iOS 5. Apple has also sold more Siri-capable iPhone 4S units than all of its previous generation of iPhone combined.”

Voice Search and the card elements from “Now” are Google’s attempts to get around that fragmentation and get the functionality in users’ hands immediately. But any apps that Google submits to the App Store for approval can be held up by Apple if it deems them too similar in functionality or design to Siri. Dilger reminds us that, “Apple previously held up approval of Google Voice for over a year, and kept Google’s Latitude friend finder app in limbo for two years as it considered the features. This left Google to rely upon web app alternatives to native titles in the App Store.”

While it is not certain that Siri will lose the race with Google, she is certainly engaged in a high-speed car chase through increasingly narrow streets.

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The hardest aspect of Siri is the language understanding part (i.e. understanding the meaning) not the speech recognition (i.e. recognizing the words). Yes, she is not perfect in either respect, but the claim that Google’s tech bests Siri when it doesn’t even attempt the hardest part is a very dubious claim. It makes me wonder whether you even understand the actual challenges involved. Some people have expectations for Siri way too high, and Apple is to blame for some of that with their marketing, but Siri does some really useful and remarkable things that nothing else does. My metric for a new technology is not how it compares to the hopes, dreams, wishes, etc. Rather it’s whether the technology has uniquely provided me something that I’m not capable of otherwise. Siri does that in several ways. Scheduling complex reminders, calendar events, alarms, etc, without having to structure your commands has been a boon to me. Wake me up when Google can do this without you having to learn the expected structure.

Correction: Google provides 100% of navigation results… for now. Come September it’s goodbye Google Maps!! A close friend of mine is a developer and I’ve seen the new maps program and turn by turn navigation system. Apple may make you wait longer for certain features, but when it releases them it’s soooooo much nicer.

Personally…I can’t stand his commercial and I have yet to see Siri respond like that. I know its staged and the questions are verified for use but really…It does Siri no good and I feel bad for Martin getting that role.

Google Voice Search (Google Now is a different app, unavailable outside Android) is far more useful than Siri (right now anyway – all I see is Google voice push Siri to get better and vice-versa). I know a lot of people with iPhones and they rarely use Siri for anything other than showing off Siri (iOS6 might change that a bit). Google Voice Search does exactly what is intended – it does a search for you and brings back exact results if it finds them or a Google search if it can’t.

Google Now on the other hand is just plain awesome (or creepy, depending on your view). A friend of mine has that on his Galaxy Nexus and already it’s got his commute to work w/ traffic report ready for him, automatically, every morning by the time he’s in the car.

So Google Now can’t do the things that I currently rely on Siri for, but it does other cool stuff that perhaps I’ll get a chance to use. That’s great. So why are people acting like either is better than the other? I think it’s a case of confusing the input mode (voice) with the actual service.